Life is a journey. Every single step leads to enlightenment.

Koinophilia – the love of average

Intrigued when reading Dr E. Funk’s philosophy, I am researching on this new terminology “koinophilia” and here I found the modern poem:

Koinophilia
Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder;
it’s in the eyes of a hundred beholders.
Helen’s face did not launch a thousand ships,
but the thousand faces of Helen can launch any ship.
Beauty is a regression to the mean,
the line that cuts a bell curve into symmetrical halves.
Koinophilia,
the true answer given by the magic mirror
when it was asked, “Who is the fairest of them all?”
To behold Helen, to dream of Snow White,
use your mouse.
Drag a thousand noses, eyes, chins, and cheeks
across the computer screen,
and stack them in virtual layers,
then click on the merge icon.
There before you is the statistical average,
a face of uncommon beauty.
Beauty is the algorithm of the mundane.
If beauty is truth, then truth is as common
as the collective mother smiling down
lovingly at her collective infant’s face.by Richard Fein

As the topic that led to this poem was about face and beauty, I can’t agree more with the author’s point of view:

… what defines beauty. Sir Francis Bacon said that beauty is harmony. Or, beauty is identified when different aspects of the face are in harmony, or in proportion with one another.
Others say that beauty is symmetry. However, studies show that the face has asymmetries in 95 percent of people. If one looks closely enough, he or she will notice that there are many beautiful faces with any number of asymmetries.
Lastly, people have been quoted stating that they cannot define beauty, but that they know it when they see it.
Dr. Funk feels that we cannot define beauty because it is always changing, particularly in the face. Our society today has accepted that beauty is found in all cultures and races.
Fifty years ago, we would have never seen Lucy Liu, Beyoncé, or Jennifer Lopez on the cover of Vogue or voted as People magazine’s most beautiful people. But, they are all beautiful women.
This is defined as koinophilia, or a love of the average. It is an average of all these different facial features that has become the allure to the human eye. Beauty is always changing because we as people are changing. Our perceptions and acceptance of beauty within different cultures are constantly changing which leads to a continually shifting idea of what defines beauty itself.